spanky wrote:
Irish Boy wrote:
Where did I say you should feel bad for programs? At the top level, lots of expenses are expenses of choice. Many could turn profits if they absolutely needed to show one. I'd say that applies for the top 30-40 programs. It gets dicier towards the bottom. I don't feel in the slightest but bad for programs that can't end up in the black, whether they're at the top of the heap or further beneath.
I'd say some schools do it from nothing but tradition, most do it because of the academic uptick (more applications, etc.) and many do it because athletic performance and academic donations are probably correlated a bit.
I'm prepared to catch heck for this, but if this your conclusion, I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with it. These "big time" schools spend the $$$ and the time/energy because it is a big-time $$$ producer for their school. They are making tons of money. How they choose to spend it, not spend it, etc. is really not important.
(Total made-up scenario is following, but you'll get my point)Here is another way to look at it: SW Montana Technical Academy (new member of Big 12 BTW) grossed............let's say $45M last year just off of football (TV, donations, tickets, merchandising, game day sales, etc.). They then chose to pay their old coach $2M to get rid of him, their new coach $5M, and the assistants a total of $5M (old and new), they built a new wing on their indoor trainig facility for $15M, spent $3M on marketing and related fees, and had to "give" the non-money sports another $5M. That leaves a about $10M for the AD to use as "football expenses" or keep as profit. Well, flying the team around, etc., is expensive. So they only get to "keep" a couple million in the end.
That is the very definition of a big-time money making corporation, which these programs are. I'm not sure you are making as grand of a statement as it would first seem on the surface.
I agree with some of this, which is why I said the top 30-40 teams could turn a profit right now if they wanted to, so long as they didn't plow so much of the revenue back into the program. There's a short term/long term problem here, though, since the less you plow in, the less you'll get back in years to come (probably). Michigan takes the stance that they should accumulate the largest Scrooge McDuck vault possible. Ohio State plows it back, but they could do the same thing.
That only gets you about 2/3rds of the way through the BCS teams however. The great, great majority of the rest of the schools will never, ever turn a profit once you take out government money and student fees. I don't have a problem with that, necessarily, and I don't think it's a reason for disbanding the MAC or anything like that.
But that really wasn't the point of all this. The point was that statements like the Rick Reilly quote at the beginning of my post get repeated all the time in major publications, and they are just grossly untrue, whatever the disagreements might be at the edges. How many thousands of dollars does ESPN have to pay Reilly to get it right?